Modern (2024) LLMs are "little return"? Seriously? For me, they've mostly replaced Google. I have no idea how well the scaling will contiue and I'm generally unimpressed with AI-doomer narratives, but this technology is real.
How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right now? The companies that are building out the datacenters produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would prefer a dividend?
I say direct, because Chrome is free to users, yet clearly has a benefit to Google worth spending on both development and advertising the browser to users, and analogous profit sources may be coming to LLMs for similar reasons — you can use it locally so long as you don't mind every third paragraph being a political message sponsored by the Turquoise Party of Tumbrige Wells.
No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 - early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.
https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-inc...
These reflexive humanist anti-AI takes are going to age like peeled bananas.
The early internet was a public project, it didn't have to worry about its own return because the point was to build a robust communications system that could survive a nuclear strike. Seeing as Openai is trying to change to a for profit corporation, it's hardly an apt comparison.
All you have to do is point to bankrupt bookseller Amazon, whom that dumb Jeff Bezos ran into the ground with his money-losing strategy for years. Clearly it doesn't work!
And yes, venture capital investing involves high risk, of which all participants are fully aware, and intentionally looking for.
We're talking <2 years since ChatGPT went viral for the first time. Generally these stories take at least 10 years to play out. Uber was unprofitable for 15 years. Now they're profitable. Every VC-backed startup is unprofitable and barely keeping the lights on for many years. None have reached 100M active users in a matter of weeks like ChatGPT.
They absolutely might fail. But the level of pessimism here is just plain funny. How much money are you willing to bet against them ever getting profitable?
How many years before they reached this point ?
chatgpt.com had 3.8B visits last month and was #8 in Internet worldwide traffic. It is the software product with by far the fastest adoption of any software product in history. "Some of the largest fundraising in Silicon Valley" you say ? Well, that sounds about right to me.
What's so poor about the unit economics in the frame we're talking about ?
Open ai is one of the fastest growing in revenue and adoption. It's not like you even know to what degree free subs are being compensated by currently. Do you even realize how much Language model costs have gone down in just 2 years ?
You're the one who said, there's a difference between the likes of Uber and Google/Amazon who apparently could have pivoted to profitability much sooner but then conveniently ignore the question of when this pivot become possible.
Newsflash: almost everyone looks poor unit this soon out.
That probably says more about you than about the tech.